Talks

[This story contains major spoilers for Peacemaker’s season two premiere.]

Peacemaker star Steve Agee has been by James Gunn’s side since a random Sunday night in 2008. 

Of course, this was long before Gunn became the co-CEO of DC Studios and the writer-director of Superman (2025), The Suicide Squad (2021) and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. At the time, Gunn had one feature film on his resumé, and he was the co-host of VH1’s reality show, Scream Queens, alongside Agee’s friend from the Saw franchise, Shawnee Smith. In time, Smith needed a plus-one for a Sunday dinner party of sorts that James’ brother Sean Gunn was throwing, so she asked Agee to buffer. He then quickly fell in with the Gunn brothers and the other guests in attendance such as Michael Rooker and Nathan Fillion. 

Agee was and is something of a jack-of-all-trades. Similar to Gunn, he’s worn a wide variety of hats as a writer, actor, musician and comedian, so it’s easy to see why he clicked right away with Gunn’s long-standing company of creative people.

“At the end of the night, James was like, ‘Hey, we do this every Sunday night. Feel free to come by anytime.’ So I went back every single Sunday night by myself, and Shawnee never went back,” Agee tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Within a year or two, Agee appeared in Gunn’s second feature film, Super, before accumulating more parts in Gunn-directed or Gunn-produced projects such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Brightburn and The Suicide Squad. The latter became a turning point for Agee since Gunn got involved with Warners right before the pandemic-era streaming boom took place. Thus, Gunn created an HBO Max spinoff series for John Cena’s villainous Squad character, Christopher Smith/Peacemaker. In turn, Agee’s ARGUS techie character, John Economos, would serve a more substantial role.

The offer for Peacemaker arrived in late 2020, and it functioned as the silver lining to Agee’s devastating year. As he was filming The Sucide Squad in January 2020, his mother was diagnosed with leukemia. And upon wrapping Squad in March, he spent all his time with her in the hospital until the pandemic guidelines required them to separate. His mother would soon pass, and Agee hadn’t had the opportunity to find a new place to live after relinquishing his apartment pre-Suicide Squad. Fortunately, his vast rolodex of friends came to his aid until Peacemaker got going, allowing him to crash at their various houses.

“I was down in the dumps. I had never been more depressed and lost,” Agee recalls. “I had nothing going on, but James wanted to make sure that everything was taken care of before he told me [about Peacemaker]. He didn’t want to get my hopes up.”

Agee certainly never expected John Economos to become his calling card following The Suicide Squad. He also executed the physical performance for the Sylvester Stallone-voiced CG character of King Shark, and if he had a future in DC, he assumed it would be as one half of King Shark.

“I thought I had more of a shot of continuing on as King Shark. John Economos was only a week’s worth of work for me in total on a five-month shoot,” Agee says. “Economos was kind of a flat character in the background of these scenes with Amanda Waller [Viola Davis], and there was really no development there. I didn’t see that going anywhere at all.”

As Gunn is famous for doing, he took the fringe character of Economos and fleshed him out across Peacemaker season one’s eight episodes, culminating in a heartbreaking monologue about why he dyes his beard. What began as a running gag evolved into the actor’s finest moment on screen.

Eight months later, Gunn accepted the role of co-CEO at DC Studios. Agee happened to be among the select few who was privy to the existence of this job offer before it became official in October 2022, and he strongly encouraged his friend to accept a role that seemed tailor-made for him.

“We were outside on his porch [in Aspen], and I could tell he had something that he wanted to talk about, but he was literally so afraid to bring it up,” Agee shares. “And then he was like, ‘I’m going to tell you something. And I swear to God, you cannot tell anybody. If people find out about this, I’ll know it was you, because, other than [co-CEO] Peter [Safran] and [wife] Jen [Holland], you are the only motherfucker that knows about this.” 

With Peacemaker season two’s long-awaited premiere, “The Ties That Grind,” now released, the 11th Street Kids of Economos, Chris Smith/Peacemaker (Cena), Emilia Harcourt (Holland), Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) and Adrian Chase/Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) are somewhat fractured, both personally and collectively. 

Economos is once again under the thumb of ARGUS, which handles the U.S. Government’s various superhero and metahuman-related operations. He’s also surveilling Peacemaker without his knowledge since ARGUS picked up on Smith’s use of his family’s Quantum Unfolding Chamber. The device contains, among other things, doorways to other dimensions, including one that tempts Peacemaker with a seemingly storybook version of his broken family. But ARGUS can’t take any chances after Superman’s Lex Luthor created a dimensional rift by way of his pocket universe.

As of this moment, journalists such as myself have only seen the first five episodes of Peacemaker season two, and Agee explains why in tantalizing fashion. He also confirms my theory that the central question of season two is whether the grass is truly greener on the other side.

“There’s a reason for that. The last three episodes are almost like a whole new season,” Agee reveals. “They are absolutely insane, and they really cross into that actual question even more so.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Agee also discusses season two’s retcon of the season one finale, as well as the Peacemaker-hosted group sex sequence that Economos witnesses.

***

James Gunn has a very tight inner circle of friends and collaborators. How did you first enroll in the Gunn-verse?

Oh man, I owe it all to Shawnee Smith, who you would know from the Saw movies.

Of course.

Shawnee, around 2008, was co-hosting a VH1 reality show with James called Scream Queens. They were looking for the next horror vixen like Shawnee in the Saw movies or a Jamie Lee Curtis-type. So one night Shawnee called me and said, “Hey, I’m going over to this dinner thing at the house of James Gunn’s brother Sean. I don’t think I’m going to know anyone there except James, so would you go with me?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ll go.” 

So I went and I immediately hit it off with James. We laughed the whole night, and I had so much in common with him, as well as everyone else at that party. I think [Michael] Rooker was there and probably Nathan Fillion and obviously Sean. At the end of the night, James was like, “Hey, we do this every Sunday night. Feel free to come by anytime.” So I went back every single Sunday night by myself, and Shawnee never went back. (Laughs.) So that’s how I met James and got involved with that whole group. 

So you were a part of his gang before you even showed up on screen in one of his projects.

Yeah, I knew James for a year or two before Super.

And before you met James, you had a similar relationship with Sarah Silverman’s circle of friends at the time?

Yeah, James and Sarah are the two people most responsible for me having any kind of career at all. I met Sarah around 1999. I was doing a play that her friend wrote, and she came to opening night. Afterwards, she came up to me and was like, “Hey, that was really great. You were really funny. Do you want to smoke a joint?” So we smoked a joint on the front steps of this theater and instantly became BFFs. 

In 2003, Sarah was the one responsible for me getting a job doing research on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. She was dating Jimmy at the time, and I had just quit a “career” in reality TV. I really wanted to be a writer, and I stuck around until 2006 or 2007 when he made me a writer. But I was terrible at it. Had I stuck around a little longer, I’m fairly certain I would’ve been fired. 

Thankfully, Sarah had written her Comedy Central pilot, and that got picked up [to series]. So I left Jimmy’s show to play Sarah’s neighbor on three seasons of The Sarah Silverman Program. That’s what started me in acting, and then I appeared in one form or another in some of her comedy specials and this other pilot that she wrote. So Sarah has always been great to me, just like James has. 

After 2010’s Super, James eventually cast you in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Brightburn and The Suicide Squad. When you walked off the set of Squad, did you believe that was it for you and John Economos? Did you assume James would go back to Marvel to film Guardians Vol. 3 and stay there?

As far as James’s future, I had no idea. I knew he was killing it and had a lot more to do. At that point, he didn’t have to worry. Everything was laying itself out for him.

But as far as me and John Economos, I thought I had more of a shot of continuing on as King Shark. I did motion capture for that character [who’s voiced by Sylvester Stallone], and it took up the bulk of my work on The Suicide Squad. John Economos was only a week’s worth of work for me in total on a five-month shoot. Between the two parts, I had more scheduled work days at the beginning of the schedule than anybody else on the movie, including Margo [Robbie] and Idris [Elba]. 

So John Economos was kind of a flat character in the background of these scenes with Amanda Waller [Viola Davis], and there was really no development there. I knew he was based on a DC character, but I didn’t see that going anywhere at all. 

Are we pronouncing John Economos wrong? Or are you pronouncing John Economos wrong? You pronounce it like economist without the t, but most others lean into the long o in -mos.

(Laughs.) It’s an ongoing debate between myself and James. So I don’t know, but when I see the name in print, it reads that way to me. Pretty much everyone else I know says Economōs. John Cena and James say it that way too. This is really weird, but John C. Reilly once said to me, “When I was growing up in Chicago, there was a family that lived directly next door to us, and their last name was Economos.” 

When we were shooting The Suicide Squad, John Ostrander, who created the [modern] Suicide Squad in the comics, came to set one day. And God, I really wish we set the [pronunciation] record straight when we had him in the room. But it was so new at that time, and we didn’t know Economos was going to go on. I should actually reach out to John Reilly to see how his neighbors pronounced it. But at this point, I don’t know if anyone really knows the correct pronunciation.

But James was like, “This is Steve. He’s playing John Economōs.” And John Ostrander was like, “You look like the guy I based him on. He was a friend of mine.” So James and I were both in shock. James didn’t even know that he was based on a real-life person. 

Everybody had a miserable pandemic experience, but yours sounded especially challenging until the Peacemaker opportunity came along. Can you recap that punishing year for the uninitiated? 

We finished shooting The Suicide Squad at the end of February, beginning of March, in 2020. The pandemic was already presenting itself more internationally than in the United States, and I remember being at the airport in Atlanta with Idris in January 2020. We were waiting to board our plane to finish shooting down in Panama, and Daniela Melchior, who played Ratcatcher 2, walked into the same terminal with a mask on. So Idris and I relentlessly made fun of her: “What are you doing? You look crazy.” And she was like, “I do not want to get COVID. It is very dangerous.” So we laughed about it, and by the time we finished our three-week run in Panama and flew back to the United States, a lot more of us were wearing masks.

I had given up my apartment when I went to shoot The Suicide Squad because my landlord wouldn’t let me sublet, and the plan was just to find a new place. Sadly, my mom had just been diagnosed with leukemia in January of 2020, and when I got back [from shooting Squad], I spent all my time with my mom at the hospital rather than looking for a place to live. Then the staff came in one day, and they were like, “You can’t come back and visit.” The lockdown had started, and I still had no place to live. So my musician friend Dave Catching, who has a studio out in Joshua Tree, also has a small cabin on the same compound. And he was like, “You can stay here.” So that’s where I spent a huge portion of the beginning of the pandemic.

And then my friend Riki Lindholm was like, “Dude, get the fuck out of the desert. You can stay at my place in Culver City.” She had a rental that was under construction and renovation. It was unfurnished, but at least it was closer to home. So I was a nomad the first year of the pandemic, and then James called me that October to say, “I wrote a greenlit series for HBO based on Peacemaker, and I have a pretty major part for John Economos if you want to do it.” And I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? Yes!” 

I was down in the dumps. I had never been more depressed and lost. I had nothing going on, but James wanted to make sure that everything was taken care of before he told me. He didn’t want to get my hopes up. So between the time he told me and the time we started shooting in Vancouver, it was only like three months. The rest is history. 

David F. Sandberg told me about the turn of events that led to you and Jennifer Holland reprising your roles as Economos and Harcourt in Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ post-credit scene. It was part of a last-minute recasting, and it was before James and Peter became co-heads of DC Studios. Was that a quite strange phone call to receive? 

No, not for me. I don’t know what happened, but I never read comic books when I was younger. I really had nothing invested personally in the whole superhero world. I really only knew the big three: Batman, Superman and, I guess, Spider-Man. So acting in superhero movies is a whole new area for me, but I’ve always been a character actor. I make a living getting random bookings and showing up to do small parts in movies or TV. But this was the first time that I showed up to play a character I had already done a couple other times, so I was actually really excited. 

I didn’t know anything about what led to Jen and I being there. I just got a call from my agent, saying, “You [and Holland] got an offer to go do this end-credit scene as Economos and Harcourt.” And I was like, “Awesome, let’s do it.” So we showed up in what might’ve been early 2022, and everyone was super nice. So it went smoothly, and I didn’t know any of the drama behind it. I didn’t know that it was originally supposed to be Black Adam. Is that right?

It was going to be Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) from Black Adam’s Justice Society, not to be confused with the Justice Gang from Superman and Peacemaker season two.

(Laughs.) There’s so many “Justice” organizations in DC. So it was just a gig for me, and it was a fun day of my life. I didn’t know about any of that other stuff until far, far later. 

I’ve been listening to the official Peacemaker podcast, and despite covering the show in season one, I somehow had no idea that Freddie Stroma’s Vigilante was a midseason recasting. Was that a pretty dramatic moment in time?

It was weird. It seems like there’s always some kind of hiccup in production, whether it’s post-production or pre-production or during production. And that goes for any production, not just the ones I work on. So it’s never really that shocking, but that was a pretty big one. We had shot at least five out of eight episodes, and it just wasn’t working out. 

So they brought in Freddie, and the way they explained it to us was: “You’re not going to have to be here another few months to reshoot this. We can literally just shoot his coverage and insert it.” A lot of the Vigilante footage already had him wearing his mask, so all they had to do was just re-voice it. 

It didn’t take a lot of fixing, thank God. There were a few days where we had to come in on a Saturday and work. But all in all, less than a week was added to the production. Freddie came in and killed it. He’s British unbeknownst to a lot of people on the cast and crew at the time. He was worried about keeping his accent, so he just stayed American [off camera]. [Writer’s Note: Even John Cena didn’t know Stroma was British until after the show wrapped its first season.]

Has Economos’ “Dye-Beard” nickname been a blessing or a curse in real life?

It’s been a great blessing. But when you’re shooting it, it’s not the best. Once a week, they have to put on a horrible amount of dye that really doesn’t match my hair color, and it looks horrible. When we did The Suicide Squad, James wanted to dye my beard just so I looked more like the comic book character. So we dyed it, and he was like, “That’s great.” And then he thought for a moment and was like, “What if we made it really dark just as an added little detail about this dude? You know something’s off and that it’s obviously dyed. He is clearly a little tone-deaf and has some issues.” But that’s all that was addressed. 

When we started the show, I remember getting the scripts and reading a whole lot of jokes at the expense of my character’s beard. Peacemaker and Economos have an arc over the whole season where he calls him “Dye-Beard” and Economos denies it. So I just remember going, “Oh my God, I’m going to have to do this for six months. I’m going to have to walk around Vancouver with this hideously obviously dyed beard.” 

And then to make matters worse, they made it more obvious by showing the roots, so I looked like a crazy person out in public. But then I read the final episode of season one, and I had this whole heartbreaking monologue about why he does it. So I was really excited that it actually paid off. It made it worth it. And as far as people in public calling me “Dye-Beard,” I don’t mind because it just cements that people are watching the show.

So the question of what is or isn’t canon has been the topic of much discussion. James once told me that any spoken references to events from The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker season one are canon. And that something obvious — like the appearance of the DCEU’s Justice League in the season one finale — is not. But I never expected him to use the “previously on” segment to replace the Justice League with the Justice Gang from Superman, as well as Superman and Supergirl. When did you first learn of this retcon?

I learned about it when I got the first script [for season two]. It was written that there’s a “previously on” before the cold open where [the 11th Street Kids] are walking away at the end of the season one finale. But now it’s Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl, plus Mister Terrific, [Superman and Supergirl] in shadow. And I was like, “Oh shit, this is a whole different ending. This makes a whole different universe.”

James kind of wrote himself into a corner with season one. At that point, there was no indication of him taking over [DC Studios]. So when he took over at DC and wanted to make a whole new universe and timeline, he had to fix it by tying Peacemaker season one to Superman. So I think that was the easiest way for him to do it.

You’ve seen James in a variety of roles: friend, actor, director, producer. Have you seen him in CEO mode yet?

I haven’t seen him in that mode, but I’ve been to his office to shoot the Peacemaker podcast that’s dropping right now. That was still about the show, so I haven’t seen him in CEO mode on the phone or in the middle of making any big decisions yet.

But I was one of the first people that knew about the job before he took it. I remember visiting him in Aspen. We were outside on his porch, and I could tell he had something that he wanted to talk about, but he was literally so afraid to bring it up. And then he was like, “I’m going to tell you something. And I swear to God, you cannot tell anybody. Nobody. Zero. If people find out about this, I’ll know it was you, because, other than [co-CEO] Peter [Safran] and Jen, you are the only motherfucker that knows about this.” 

So he told me, and I was like, “Holy shit.” He hadn’t accepted the job yet. This was still a week or two before he said yes to it. My opinion was like, “Dude, you absolutely have to say yes to this.” Comic books are such a big part of James’ life and his development as a storyteller. I don’t think I know anybody that knows more about comic books than James. So I said, “This seems like a job that was made for you.” 

As has been the case on a number of other HBO shows, the season two premiere leads to a lot of unclothed people in a group sex scene. How bizarre was that day on set? 

It was one of the most bizarre shooting experiences of my life. I got a script that said, “John Economos comes up to the window of a Peacemaker’s house and looks through it to see an orgy happening.” In your head, you’re like, “It’s going to be shot like any other [sex scene]. They’re going to find creative ways of hiding the nudity, and it’ll probably be like six-to-ten people, mostly women.” 

But when I showed up on set, the first shot of Economos walking up to the window and looking in was also my first time realizing what shit was going to look like on the show. So I was legitimately shocked. There were 30 people in that living room. Fully naked guys and girls were all doing very sexual things, and some were dancing. So I just remember thinking, “I can’t believe that they can show this on TV now.” That was a really surreal day for me. 

Economos is put in a tough spot this season. He’s torn between ARGUS and the 11th Street Kids. And as we see in the season two premiere, he has to surveil Chris without him knowing.

Yeah, it’s a fine line that Economos is now walking in season two. He’s pretty much the only one of that group who’s still working at ARGUS. On the one hand, this is a guy who lives in a bubble and likes his routine. He enjoys having steady work, but he doesn’t like the people he works with. He worked for Amanda Waller, and she’s kind of a monster. Now he’s working for a different kind of monster [Frank Grillo’s Rick Flag Sr.] with different intentions. 

Economos doesn’t like having to surveil and give information on Peacemaker and his friends to Rick Flag Sr. But on the other side of that, he’s able to watch out for Peacemaker and the rest of the gang because he’s one step ahead of ARGUS. So it’s a shitty job to have, but it’s also good to be in a position where he’s able to help his friends. If given a choice, Economos, hands down, would choose his friends over ARGUS. 

Until the events of Peacemaker season one, this guy was kind of a loner and kind of a loser. Then they had that whole confrontation with the Butterflies, and it was a whole Band of Brothers situation. I’ve been saying that it was their Vietnam. (Laughs.) He’s now bound to these people, and no matter what, that can’t be taken away. So I think he would a hundred percent choose his friends over his job if he had to.

In the terms of the audience, Peacemaker season one redeemed Peacemaker after he killed Rick Flag Jr. (Joel Kinnaman) in The Suicide Squad. But he’s not redeemed in the eyes of Bloodsport (Elba), Harley (Robbie) and Ratcatcher (Melchior). They may not even be aware he survived the incident in Corto Maltese. Do you expect that story to be resolved someday? 

I have not even thought about that aspect and those other people like Harley Quinn, Bloodsport and Ratcatcher not realizing it. The Peacemaker crew exists in a world where those people exist, and while I don’t know if it’ll happen, there’s obviously a chance that paths can cross. But if Idris’ character came across Peacemaker, he still wouldn’t know [about Peacemaker’s season one arc]. It’s really only the audience that knows that this dude was forced by his father into fighting his brother and accidently killing him. So nobody [from The Suicide Squad’s Corto Maltese mission] really knows what made Peacemaker the way he is.

After season one’s dance sequence became a sensation, did everybody feel a lot more pressure on the second one?

The person who probably felt the most pressure from it was probably Charissa Barton, our choreographer. It’s a lot. She not only had to come up with a new dance number, but also a dance number for almost twice as many characters. We shot that for two days, as opposed to an afternoon for season one’s dance number. And I don’t think there was any pressure going into season one. We didn’t know how that would be received, and it just ended up being this huge thing that was copied on TikTok, Instagram and everywhere. So there’s a little pressure to try and live up to that, for sure.

I was a shy kid growing up, and so I really related to Economos’ upcoming line, “For me, just looking somebody directly in the eyes is an act of heroism.”

(Laughs.) Yeah, me too. In The Suicide Squad, there wasn’t a lot to Economos, but once James started writing Peacemaker season one, there’s now a lot of me in Economos. There’s a scene early on in season one where Adebayo, Harcourt and Peacemaker come into the office after a gunfight. And Adebayo was so amped up because she’s never done that before. She was like, “We just got shot at! Have you ever been shot at?” And Economos dejectedly goes, “Nooo.” You can tell that he’s jealous. 

But there’s also a part of Economos that Jen calls “the reluctant hero.” He doesn’t want to do any acts of heroism, but he always does because these are his friends. And that’s very much me. I’d love to go skydiving, but there’s no way in hell I’m ever going to go skydiving. So as far as acting as John Economos, it’s pretty much autopilot for me. When I get the scripts, I’m like, “Yep, yep. This all checks out. I relate to everything that this dude is saying.” 

There’s the expression, “The grass is always greener on the other side,” and it seems to me that the primary goal of season two is to answer the question of whether the grass is truly greener on the other side.

A hundred percent! It’s a big theme, and it’s a theme that’s tested throughout the season. I’m assuming you have only been shown the first five episodes?

Correct. 

There’s a reason for that. The last three episodes are almost like a whole new season. They are absolutely insane, and they really cross into that actual question even more so.

***
Peacemaker season two is currently streaming new episodes on HBO Max every Thursday.